The first year I lived in Indiana, I auditioned for the choral ensembles at IU and was placed in the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. Note that if you peruse the previously linked page, you may find that the home page for CVE is nonexistent. This is not surprising given how much the music school cares about its choral program or about ensemble musicianship in general. You will never find the opera pages in such a state of disarray, however! Oh no, not them.
But I digress. CVE was a largely regrettable experience. I almost typed "forgettable," but it would indeed be difficult to forget. Our director, Carmen Tellez, is a scholar of the highest order and passionately committed to her cause -- performing contemporary choral music. Unfortunately, yours truly is not a very big fan of most contemporary choral music, because yours truly is of the opinion that most contemporary choral music is bad. Add to this the fact that Carmen's greatest talents don't really lie in conducting and her choir is mostly full of conductors, not singers, made the group a study in divergent singing ability meeting with bizarre and immensely difficult music. You add that up and tell me how it looks to you. I did meet some cool people, though, and it also was the source of my film debut.
One of the last projects I did with CVE was a performance of The Bells of Leopardi by Yehuda Yannay. It easily fit in with the other music we did that spring (the theme of the concert was something completely crazy like "Music in Space and Time"). In portions of the piece, a voice recites numbers in Italian while the choir sings marcato chords imitating a clock tower. So guess who was the voice?
Anyway, the performance then spawned a multimedia project! It was set in the semi-circular concrete staircase in the Musical Arts Center on campus, and involved a toddler with a book, a vision of beauty, a chorus in black and the insomniac poet himself, played by the man with the voice, yours truly. I can't really remember much of the explanation for why the video contained all this, since it was two years ago. But it was an entertaining day in the MAC, walking up and down stairs, staring at people intensely, and that sort of thing.
When it was over, Carmen told us that she'd be in touch when the post production was finished. I never heard from her again.
Fast forward to last weekend and my visit to Bloomington. I ran into Sara Schaeffer in Mother Bear's. When she saw me, her eyes got wide and she pointed at me like I was a ghost. (I get this reaction a lot.) And said, "You! Carmen wants to talk to you! The video is done!"
And so it is. It's pretty weird, as expected, but the production values are pretty good. To think I didn't even need to move to LA to see my name in lights -- err, I mean, in Youtube.